Infant Sleep and the Quality of Family Life for First-Time Parents of Three-Month-Old Infants

Abstract

While it is widely recognized that sleep patterns in early infancy can affect the quality of family life, studies have focused primarily on sleep problems that emerge in later infancy. Further, researchers have tended to conceptualize the quality of family life primarily in terms of the psychological functioning of the mother and have thus ignored the experiences of fathers. Grounded in a family systems framework, this study explores the relationship between nighttime infant sleep duration, infant negativity, psychological and relational functioning in first-time parents of three-month-old infants. Infant sleep duration was significantly associated with father’s reports of parenting stress, family functioning and infant negativity. Infant sleep duration was related to fathers’ psychological functioning with fathers whose infants slept for shorter periods reporting higher levels of distress than fathers whose infants slept for longer periods of time. Contrary to expectations, neither mothers’ psychological functioning, nor mothers’ or fathers’ ratings of relational functioning were significantly associated with infant sleep duration. These results highlight the importance of studying the influences of normal infant behaviors on new parents and of expanding the study of early infant development beyond a focus on the mother-child dyad.